History and Mission

Info

Mission: The Bullitt History of Medicine Club (BHOMC) promotes the understanding and appreciation of the historical foundations upon which current medical knowledge and practice is constructed, by encouraging social and intellectual exchanges between faculty members, medical students, and members of the community.

Meetings: The Bullitt Club holds monthly lecture meetings at the UNC Health Sciences Library. All meetings are free and open to the public.

Meeting Times: Evening meetings begin at 5:30pm with light refreshments; presentations begin at 6:00pm. Daytime meetings run from noon to 1:00pm, also with light refreshments.

Please check the meeting schedules for further details or changes that might occur.

Meeting History: The first meetings of the History of Medicine Club were held in the homes of various faculty members. As attendance grew, meetings were held in different places throughout the Medical School.

Records of the early years are not complete, but evening lectures seem to have been the the norm from the beginning.

In the 2000/2001 academic year 8 evening lectures were hosted in the Rare Books Room of the Health Sciences Library. Since then the HSL has continued to host and assist with the organization of BHOMC meetings to the present day.

As interest in the history of medicine began to grow the Trent History of Medicine Society at Duke also began to offer a series of monthly evening lectures, independent of the Bullitt Club series, but the competition for speakers was intense, and in the 2005/2006 academic year, the two organizations decided to collaborate, alternating the meeting location each month between the UNC-Chapel Hill Health Sciences Library and the Duke Medical Library History of Medicine Collections.

Two years later the Bullitt Club noon lecture series was begun. The noon lectures were shorter, and were presented in months when the evening lecture was hosted at Duke.

Due to the success of the BHOMC Noon lecture series, and concern that students would not want to return to Campus for an evening lecture, the Bullitt Club made the decision to hold the majority of its 2012/2013 meetings during the day, rather than in the evening. In that same academic year the Trent Society chose to focus on sponsoring one major lecture each semester during the academic year, thus ending the jointly sponsored lecture series.